U.S. occupation in Iraq is like Civil War, WWII, not Vietnam(apparently)

Secretary of State Rice compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early.

Which, of course, is so totally the most convincing argument to Essence's readership.

http://www.wonkette.com/images/2006/03/secretary%20donald%20rumsfeld%20with%20buxom%20babe.jpg

I'll never understand how certain leftwing historians and
neo-Confederates stand united in accepting this historical
fallacy (whether Lincoln believed it, or not).

Prior to the Civil War, Lincoln had a long track record of opposing slavery. He was no abolitionist, but he certainly opposed slavery. You could argue that he valued the preservation of the union over the emancipation of slaves, but that shouldn't be misconstrued as an indifference to slavery.

Er, because Lincoln's speeches and private letters said as much?

nabisco srsly, srsly otm ... reconstruction is one of those what-ifs that thinking about too much just depressed the living fuck out of you

(Then they went home and started rearming themselves. The French/British public weren't ready for another war yet, and their militaries certainly weren't. If they'd fought just then it's possible "we'd all be speaking German blah blah blah" etc ...)

And anyways, haven't any of these neocon dudes ever heard of Godwin's Law?! They keep conceding the argument ...

>it was never about ending African-American slavery but about
>saving the Union and if slavery had to go to do so, so be it.

I don't disagree that Lincoln said this. I just say that Lincoln was wrong. Actually, he was probably lying. Like any good president, he had to talk out of both sides of his mouth in order to keep together the federalist coalition.

The Civil War didn't spring fully formed out of the 1860 election and the firing on Ft. Sumter. It was a conflict that had been brewing for decades, rooted in questions of slavery. I'm not saying that there weren't other causes, but the ROOT cause was slavery. states rights just wouldn'thave been a huge issue if slavery wasn't in jeapordy.

And let's clarify some of the terms here, too, because there's something about the administration's use of the word "war" that I'm beginning to think is a clever trick. The truth is that we've won the "war" in Iraq. The government that we set out to topple has been toppled; the state that we attacked no longer exists. What we're doing now isn't staying the course of an unfinished war -- what we're doing now is failing miserably at organizing a peaceful and viable state in the aftermath, in part because it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone in the administration that this might be, like, hard.

So there's a much better analogy here: one in which the Confederacy is brought to a surrender, but the Union finds it impossible to establish working government control in the south, due to a massive Ku Klux Klan (created by former Confederate soldiers!) terrorizing troops, ex-slave militias cruising toward all-out war with the KKK, and Florida sitting autonomously below and kinda hoping to secede altogether.

It's September 2006 in Iraq

...I've thrown up Stratfor's current take on things, FWIW.

yup, industrialization vs 18th-C agriculture & all that

Truer words never spoken typed, etc... and your point about the KKK OTM.

Btw, everybody, take a glance at Schama's 'Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution'.

But the Revolutionary War was supposedly about taxes, right? RIGHT?!11

Does our involvement in Iraq constitue a just war? In a sense. Our military is trying to do the right thing over there, protect civilians and keep the peace, etc. We're certainly not CONDUCTING this war the way we conducted the war in Vietnam (indiscriminate bombing, and let God sort 'em out). The problem isn't that the war is unjust. The problem is that the war will never end. War in Iraq is a way of life.